PLUS Berichtzusammenfassung

Complementarity of urban leadership and community involvement as a measure of institutional performance and urban sustainability: A new methodological approach to effective urban governance

This work package operationalises the conceptual framework to underpin the empirical research and ensure consistency across the case studies. It provides a guide for the qualitative and quantitative data collection, measuring the key concepts in out conceptual framework:- The contextual variables at local, national and international level;

- The institutional variables at case level;

- The cultural variables at the level of the cities;

- The actual Combinations of Urban Leadership and Community Involvement at case level (actual behaviour of participants);

- The institutional performance in achieving sustainability at the case level.

These objectives will be realised by the production of three project reports:- Deliverable 7: Criteria for measuring institutional performance.

- Deliverable 8: Guide for data collection in case studies.

- Deliverable 9: Common questionnaires for interviews/surveys.

Deliverable 7 provides the operationalisation of the institutional performance in the two policy fields of social inclusion and economic competitiveness and will result in a guide for data collection on this variable. Deliverable 8 provides the operationalisation of all other variables. The common questionnaires that result from the operationalisation of all variables are collected in deliverable 9.

Methodology and scientific achievements

Methodology:As far as the measurement of institutional performance is concerned we will use the self-defined policy objectives of the local policy communities in the fields of social inclusion and economic competitiveness as the basic standard for assessing performance. However, these objectives have to be put in the context of broader sustainability criteria. As the measurement of actual sustainability would need a time-frame that is far beyond the range of the project, we will on the one hand rely on opinions of informed local experts to indicate expected sustainability of policies and on the other hand on procedural safeguards aimed at integrating the basic dimensions of the sustainability concept (social, economic and ecological).

The characteristics of combinations of leadership and community involvement will be described at two levels. At the level of the local institutions we will use the Institutional Analysis and Development framework by Elinor Ostrom. The different types of rules of this framework are operationalised into a set of variables that can be used to describe configurations of positions for leaders, citizens and other participants. These positions enable actors to take certain actions and prevent other actions.

Within the arena that is set up by these institutions the actors develop their actual behaviour in policy processes. These actions of leaders, citizens and others form the second level where the actual combinations of leadership and community involvement (CULCI) develop and result in policy outputs. These descriptions of the policy processes will include a methodology of actor mapping (identifying actors, their resources and motivations) and a description of the actions of these actors (policy proposals presented, coalition formation, agreement and conflicts).

Local political culture will be measured with panels of informed local key figures using fixed questionnaires on six dimensions of political culture.